Only on the internet could I fulfill such random curiosity with such convenience. While waiting for paper mache to dry I submitted the question to the “Ask A Linguist” list.

In case anyone else is curious, I’ve compiled a few highlights from the responses I received….

The short answer

Originally, C spelled the sound /g/. But, with some help from the Etruscans, the Romans got into a bit of a tangle here, and they wound up using C to spell both the sound /g/ and the sound /k/, while they hardly used the letter K at all. Eventually, realizing this was a bad idea, they invented a new letter, G, to spell the sound /g/, and they then used C exclusively to spell the sound /k/.

This was the system borrowed from the Romans by the Anglo-Saxons. Originally C spelled only /k/ in Old English. But then the pronunciation of English changed. (Larry Trask)

Another important consideration

“‘c’ is often used (though not always) for roots whose pronunciation alternates between [s] and [k]. think of ‘public’ vs. ‘publicity’. If we spelled the first ‘publik’ and the second ‘publisity’ we wouldn’t be able to see the relationship between the two words as easily.” (Susan Fisher)

A longer story
(this might make a good children’s book if it had pictures)

“That’s a very good question, and the answer is that it didn’t always make those sounds. See, the language we speak has changed over the centuries, as all languages do. And writing — which is different from talking, changes too, though much more slowly.

The letter C wasn’t invented for English. It was invented several thousand years ago to write down the sounds of Phoenician, a language related to Hebrew and Arabic. At the time, the letter was called “gamel” or something like that, which means ‘camel’ (see the C?). It represented the G sound (the letter G was invented later, by the Romans).

Later on the Greeks started using the Phoenician alphabet and they used the letter to represent the G sound, too. Not having any camels, they called it “gamma”; the K sound was represented by the letter K, called “kappa”. And later still, people in Italy used it, but they didn’t have a G sound, so they used it for the K sound.

The Romans eventually wound up using this alphabet, with the letter C standing for the K sound, but they did have a G sound, so they put a little jot on the C and made it a G (they didn’t use the letter K, except for words they borrowed from Greek).” (John Lawler)

“In the Norman French era, “C” was pronounced “S” before the letters “I,E,(Y)”, and otherwise “K”, After William the Conquerer captured England in 1066, English borrowed a lot of French words with French spellings, so “C” became a letter with two sounds. English also had words like “king, keep” where /k/ was pronounced before /e,i/, so the Greek letter “K” was reintroduced to keep things straight (more or less).” (Elizabeth J. Pyatt)

Many thanks to those fine linguists who helped me understand the interesting history of the letter C, and it’s relatives K and G:Susan Fischer, NTID/RITJohn Lawler, U Michigan Linguistics Dept
Herb Stahlke, Ball State University
Larry Trask, University of Sussex
Mike HammondElizabeth J. Pyatt, Ph.D., Penn State UniversityAnthea Fraser GUPTA,University of Leeds

Actually, the rule for Italian is easy to remember. Before “i” or “e” (soft vowels) it’s the English “ch” sound, and before “a” “o” or “u” (hard vowels) it’s the English “k” sound. To get the English “ch” sound before a hard vowel, you throw an “i” after the “c” — like “ciao”. To get the “k” sound before a soft vowel, you throw an “h” in — like “chianti”. There’s one quirk: if there’s an “s” before the “c”, it’s an English “sh” sound if it’s followed by a soft vowel, and an English “sk” if it’s followed by a hard vowel — “prosciutto” and “scampi”.

This is the same for “g” (“spaghetti”, “Giovanni”, “gorgonzola” etc.). There’s no “s” quirk with “g”, but there is an “l” quirk: before a soft vowel, “gl” is pronounced sort of like an English “y” sound.

In Lojban, the “c” stands for the English “sh” sound.

And if your son decides that English spelling is stupid (and it is), have him check out Shavian, an alternate phonetic alphabet for English commissioned by George Bernard Shaw.

Why do we have the differnece in pronouncing ‘cha’
like in ‘character’ we have the sound ‘ka’ while when we write ‘champion’ we use ‘cha’ itself can anyone give me proper explanation for this.
if so please mail me at michaeldjoan@gmail.com

the original most perfect alphabet is ellene .. [ greek is a nickname for it] the capital letters are different than the small letters making it very difficult for most today. when schools and libraries were burned by priests in rome it was dark ages. c was a mistake and left this way by gypsies that burned schools and libraries. the new testament was written in the simplest form of it. we have interlinears available cbd bookstore Peabody ma.